The New Normalization

As a new year dawns, we recall the warnings of a KGB defector to understand the destabilization being inflicted upon us.

This century has been generous. It’s given us plenty to complain about, and many of us have taken full advantage. We’ve drunk from every half-empty glass, and found the cloud within each silver lining.

Dazed and confused, groping in the dark as the ground shifts beneath our feet, it’s hard each day not to bang our head on beams of unease, step in piles of disquiet, or stumble into pits of stupidity.

Each week offers a bountiful harvest of ripe gripes, in a vast assortment of sour varietals.

The vines weigh heavy…with government over-reach and popular acquiescence…with superstition masquerading as science…with neighborly snitching and official snooping…with restrictions on businesses and free rein to loot them…with distant wars and proximate rip-offs…with an expunged past and forfeited future.

As these noxious fruit fill the vat, we recline for a moment, take a deep breath, and swirl our thoughts. And we realize things really aren’t that bad. 

They’re worse. 

Because this concoction wasn’t inevitable, nor accidental. Much of it is deliberate, diabolical, and deceitful. And it’s been cooking for a while. Next year might be the most noxious year yet.

As Doug Casey said several weeks ago, it might be the worst year in living memory. To add emphasis, he repeated his trademark assertion that it’ll likely be worse than even he thinks it will be. With an extra flute (or bottle) of flat Champagne to chase Casey’s point, let’s consider its ramifications…and its rationale.

During the financial crisis, the Treasury, Fed, and SEC described their interventions and restrictions as the “new normal.” The CDC used the same creepy expression to prime people for endless clamp-downs, mindless masking, and incessant shots. This echoed earlier language in the name of “homeland” defense, explaining why clandestine agencies must monitor Americans to keep them “free.”

But what does this “new normal” entail? What do these entities that push it really mean by the phrase?

Since the millennium flipped, authorities have continually fomented fear, encouraged angst, and stoked anger. Astonishingly, it continues to work. It’s staggering the absurdities people keep falling for, and the idiocy they seem destined to repeatedly endure.

After each far-fetched psyop, con job, and double-cross, popular panic persists and authorities double down. Regardless the lies and deceit, the gullible public keeps kicking at the football. And along the southern border, our “leaders” welcome millions of invaders to help pull it away.

Each month, as with Muslim hordes inundating Europe, hundreds of thousands of (mostly young male) migrants are imported to America to undermine it from within. Few deny this. It’s just a matter of which euphemism people choose to apply. It’s happening in plain sight right under our nose. Politicians brag about it, knowing the people it harms will be outvoted by the vagrants.

But what to do about it? It’s hard to see what options exist.

Property rights, protection of which is among the few things government should assure, are blatantly ignored. With few exceptions in a couple border states, leaders who complain tend to lament lack of “resources” rather than destruction of the country.

They resent nomads being shipped to their “sanctuary” cities as a consequence of open-door policies they aggressively promote. But as they oppose the means, they’re fine with the ends. Their only ask is that they afflict someone else.

What gives? Are politicians and bureaucrats really this detached from reality? Maybe. But it’s doubtful. An honest politician, like a chaste prostitute, is rare.

At some point, we must acknowledge that the people ruling over us are more self-interested than senseless, more sinister than stupid, more devious than dumb. They may not rise to an occasion, but they will stoop to it. 

They have incentive to shovel BS, and to believe it. After the calamities they’ve caused, they better believe it. They must make everyone think their devastation isn’t for naught.

To reverse field would confess culpability for self-inflicted damage unparalleled in peacetime (leaving aside the immense carnage their wars cause). They need to maintain the charade that viruses succumb to compulsion, that “diversity is our strength”, and that counterfeiting currency creates prosperity.

Yet the selfish explanation is insufficient. There may also be a more ominous one. Our overlords are more interested in their power than in our prosperity. Their wealth supersedes our health. And their tactics for obtaining it thru phony “science”, false narratives, fake “compassion”, and rising tension are not without precedent.

The process started long ago, and is still underway. But the pace of decline has picked up speed. Like a call option on Western culture, decay accelerates as time goes by. The only question is when it expires.

It’s hard to know. But we have a sense when it might’ve begun.

As a new year dawns, we’re reminded of a prescient 1984 interview between G. Edward Griffin and Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent who defected in 1970. In it, Bezmenov explained four stages of collapse that Marxists orchestrate from inside a “target nation”. 

Unlike the four turnings of Howe and Strauss, the episodes Bezmenov described are not of equal length, and do not recur. Instead, each is shorter than its predecessor, till the final phase…which is indefinite.

To erode a country from within, its people must first be demoralized. This entails undermining that society’s traditional values, making it ripe for revolutionary take-over. 

The process requires at least twenty years, which is the time needed to “educate” a single generation. According to Bezmenov, the “Demoralization” of America was nearing completion at the time he gave the interview.

And it had been quite successful. It was a thorough cleansing, to an extent “Comrade Andropov could not have dreamed” (wonder what he’d think now, after being asleep forty years). As this stage proceeded, indoctrination and disinformation were eventually inflicted by Americans on Americans, “because they lacked moral standards”. 

After the demoralization, “exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him.” Academia, entertainment, and the media are the primary actors in this de-morality play. For the last fifty years, they have read their lines and played their part to sap society’s soul.

“Destabilization” follows. This is the wave that has soaked the 21st century. Particularly since the financial melt-down of 2008, it has been building to a crescendo. This feels like the year it will crash, if it hasn’t already.

In this period, the subverters don’t much care about the populace. The propaganda has already permeated the people. By now, they are no more than disposable pawns or useful idiots. Their ideas and actions are irrelevant, except insofar as they can be used to distract the plebs into artificial factions, and pit them against one another. 

The bread and circuses of social media, popular entertainment, and electoral politics keep the rubes occupied while the real action happens behind the curtain. There the operatives focus on the economy, the military, and foreign relations, primarily thru the Fed, Pentagon, and CIA. What happens in any of those agencies is rarely up for debate, and when it is it is mostly ornamental. The peons generally have no say in (and less awareness of) the matter.

With the third phase comes the “Crisis”, and the climactic collapse. Bezmenov indicated this can happen quickly, and seemingly from nowhere. It can take many forms, including (to grasp a few random hypotheticals) an over-hyped virus, manufactured riots, catastrophic wars…or a contested election. 

The precipitating factors usually provoke uprisings that bring police action or military intervention. The revolutionary stage sets out to correct wrongs, but usually ends up stripping rights. As Doug Casey put it, whereas the powers-that-be once treated the populace as milk cows, they now view them as beef cows.

As the cattle move thru the chute, they enter the final phase. 

“Normalization” comes when the Crisis is quelled. The people are worn out. They seek security and crave calm. The previous phases have dimmed their cultural outlook, discredited their traditional behavior, anesthetized them into submission, and acclimated them to force. Many even welcome a crack-down of perceived threats to public safety and prevailing ideology. The State, posing as their pastor, is happy to save them. It makes a desert, and calls it peace. 

At this point, as Brezhnev announced after the Soviets pacified Prague, “the situation is normalized.”

Maybe that’s what the government’s creepy expression means.